4

B eyond the clearing with the two tent-cabins, the gray of the lake was darkening, waves starting to spin off white tails of spume. Fawn could hear them slapping the shore beneath the nearby bank, where a stand of cattails bent and hissed in the rising wind. Only a single narrow boat was still in view, with two men paddling like mad for a farther shore. In the slate-colored air to the north, dazzling forks of lightning snaked from sky to earth, their thunder still laggard in arriving. The pearl of the sun, sinking toward Mare Island, disappeared behind a darker cloud even as she watched, turning the light gloomy.

Under the awning of the cabin on the right, a thin, straight, rigid figure in a skirt stood beside their piles of saddles and gear, watching anxiously up the path they were descending. Omba in her riding trousers lurked in the shadows behind, leaning against a support post with her arms crossed.

“What are you going to say?” Fawn whispered urgently to Dag.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what she says. If the rumors have run ahead of me, she’ll have had time to get over being happy I’m alive and move on to other concerns. Depending on who all ’sides Omba got to her with the rumors, she could be pretty well stirred up.”

“You left our gear in plain sight—she’d have to know you’re back even without Omba.”

“There is that.”

Did he even have a plan? Fawn was beginning to wonder.

As they neared, the woman in the skirt stood bolt upright. Her hands twitched out once, then she planted them firmly on her hips. Cumbia Redwing wore her silvery-gray hair pulled back in the simple mourning knot. Her skin had less of the burnished copper in it than Dag’s—darker, more leathery, more worn—if striking in contrast with the hair. Fawn might have guessed her age as a healthy seventy, though she knew she was two decades beyond that. Her eyes were the clear tea color, narrowing under pinched-in streaks of silver brows as they swept over Fawn; in a better light, Fawn suspected they would be bright gold like Dag’s.

As they came up to the edge of the awning, Cumbia thrust out her chin, and snapped, “Dag Redwing Hickory, I’m speechless!”

Behind them, Dar muttered, “Bet not.” Dag’s brows barely twitched acknowledgment of this.

Proving Dar right, she went on, “Whatever you patrollers do out on the road, the rule is, you don’t bring it home. You can’t be bringing your farmer whore into my tent.”

As if he hadn’t heard her, Dag pulled the shrinking Fawn forward, and said, “Mama, this is my wife, Fawn Bluefield.”

“How de’ do, ma’am.” Fawn dipped her knees, frantically searching amongst the hundred rehearsed speeches in her mind for something to follow. She hadn’t imagined doing this in a thunderstorm. She hadn’t imagined most of this.

Dag forestalled her. Now standing behind her, he slid his hook, carefully turned downward, under her left wrist and elevated it. “See? Wife.” He shrugged his left shoulder to display his own marriage cord.

Cumbia’s eyes widened in horror. “You can’t have—” With a hic-cough of breath, she choked out, “Cut those things.”

“No, ma’am,” said Dag in a weirdly affable tone. Flying, Fawn thought. Off in that other place he went to when things turned deadly sour, when action moved too fast for thought, and he turned it all over to some other part of himself that could keep up. Or not…

“Dag, if you do not burn those abominations and take that girl right back where you found her, you are never entering my tent again.” Had Cumbia been rehearsing too? Coached by excited rumormongers? There seemed something deeply awkward about her, as if her mouth and eyes were trying to say two different things. Dag might know with his groundsense, if he hadn’t obviously closed it down as hard as a hickory shell.

Dag smiled, or at any rate, his mouth curved sunnily, though his eyes stayed tight, making him look, for a moment, oddly like his mother. “Very good, ma’am.” He turned to his stunned listeners. “Omba, Dar, good to see you again. Fawn, get your bags and bedroll. We’ll send someone back for the saddles tomorrow. Omba, if she throws them out in the rain, could you put them under cover for me?”

Omba, staring wide-eyed, nodded.

Wait, what? “But Dag—”

He bent and hooked up Fawn’s saddlebags and handed them to her, then hooked his own over his shoulder. She clutched the heavy load awkwardly to her chest as he put his arm around her back and turned her toward the clearing. The first big raindrops spattered down, batting the hickory leaves and hitting the dirt with audible plops.

“But Dag, no one—she hasn’t—I haven’t—”

Reversing herself abruptly, Cumbia said, “Dag, you can’t go out there now, it’s coming on to storm!”

“Come along, Spark.” He hustled her out.

A few fat drops plunked onto the top of her head like hard finger-taps, soaking cold down to her scalp. “But Dag, she’s not hardly—I didn’t even get a chance to—” Fawn turned back to dip her knees again and call a desperate, “Nice to meet you, ma’am!” over her shoulder.

“Where are you going?” cried Cumbia, echoing Fawn’s thoughts exactly. “Come back out of the rain, you fool!”

“Keep walking,” Dag muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t look back, or it’ll be all to do over again.” As they passed a big basket leaning against a stump, piled high with dark round shapes, he thunked his hook into one, snatching it up in passing. His stride lengthened. Fawn scurried to keep up.

As they reached the road, Dag hesitated, and Fawn panted, “Where are we going?”

He glanced over his shoulder. Through the trees, the far shore of the lake had disappeared behind a thick gray curtain of rain; Fawn could hear the oncoming hiss of it. “I have some folks who owe me favors, but that’ll best be for tomorrow, I think. Right now we just need shelter. This way.”

To Fawn’s considerable dismay, he turned down the path leading to the bone shack. She grappled her saddlebags around over her shoulder and trotted after. The fat raindrops gave way, in a cold gust, to little hailstones, slicing down through the leaves and bouncing off the path, and, more painfully, off her. The pebble-sized ice triggered a heavier and even more alarming hail of hickory husks as the trees creaked in the wind, and Fawn pictured heavy branches coming down on them like huge hammers. Both she and Dag ducked and ran through the ominous shadows.

She was gasping and even Dag was out of breath when they arrived back at Dar’s work-cabin. Along the eaves, the bones spun and knocked against one another in the gusts like dreadful wind chimes. Hail and hickory husks rattled off the roof shingles, sometimes sailing up again in high arcs before plopping to earth that was rapidly turning to mud. She and Dag thumped up the steps and huddled under the little porch roof.

With his wet hair plastered to his forehead and his jaw set, Dag attempted to free his hook from the plunkin by grasping the round root under his sling-arm, which made his saddlebags in turn slide off his shoulder and land on his feet. He cursed.

“Here,” said Fawn in exasperation. “Let me.”

She dumped her own bags, wriggled the plunkin free of his hook, set it down, then turned to pluck the latchstring out of its slot and pull the door open. The shuttered cabin was dark, and she peered in doubtfully.

Dag bent down to hook futilely at his bootlaces. “Undo these for me, would you, Spark?” he muttered. “Dar doesn’t like his floor dirtied.”

She knocked the hook aside before he could snarl the laces into inextricable wet knots, undid first his, then hers, and set both pairs beside the door. She wiped her hands in aggravation on her riding trousers and followed him inside. He bent over a workbench; a welcome light flared from a good beeswax candle in a clay holder. He lit a second from the first, and with that and the faint gray light leaking through the shutters and from the door, she was finally able to see clearly.